How can you build a customer-centric culture?

Customer-centric culture

Organizations talk about being customer-centric and striving to deliver the best of customer experiences – but are they really? You as an organization could be, but are your processes really designed for that? What role are your employees playing? Your employees want to play an active part in contributing to customer-centricity and good customer experience.

A recent study around customer-centric organizations showed 76% of the staff found their jobs satisfying and meaningful on account of the significant impact they had on customers.

How can you build a customer-centric culture?

Building a customer-centric culture takes a considerable amount of time, but once an organization can crack the code, they can stand the test of time and grow in profitability. Here are some ways to move towards building a customer-centric culture

• Empathize with the customer: Although claimed by every organization, only some organizations really put in the efforts and means to empathize with their customers. It is critical to understand the emotional need of a customer, the rationale behind what they want to empathize and serve them effectively. Like most important things in organizations, leadership needs to spearhead this initiative.
  
  A recent survey conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers said that only 38% of consumers in the States believed employees understood their needs and requirements.
• Recruit accordingly: It is good practice to understand customers’ orientation when hiring them. You can do this while hiring them for a role; also, this is important for any and every role and not just ‘customer-facing’ roles. It can be gauged through a simple test, their past experience, or their approach towards customers. You can set up a panel for this if need be, have reps from multiple functions in one of the interview rounds.
• Link compensation with customer-centricity: If you tie compensation with delivering better customer experience, then every employee is involved and has a part to play. You can design incentive structures around that or work out a program that meets your requirements. This also helps in aligning employee goals with organizational goals.
• Encourage customer interaction: Interacting with the customers is the best way to go about building a customer-centric approach. Every employee, no matter what function or department they belong to, affects CX. If that is the case, then why not let them interact with the customers? Let them experience things and understand problems first hand, from the customers themselves.
• Employee experience (EX) is linked with customer experience (CX): This is absolutely true; they both are intrinsically linked. We recently published a blog talking about CX Vs. EX, why don’t you have a look. Organizations that have good employee engagement rates deliver better customer experiences. Customers are happy to be associated with such organizations. Engaged employees are more focussed on and strive to make the customer experience better and put in discretionary effort.

Recent studies show that organizations with positively engaged staff perform better than their counterparts by about 147%. Now that’s some number!

How can our QuestionPro Workforce help?

QuestionPro Workforce is trusted by several organizations across domains worldwide – big, medium, or small. An employee experience and work culture management platform, Workforce lets you conduct staff surveys, gather responses, analyze that data, and make informed decisions. Here’s how you can use it to build a customer-centric culture in your organization.

• Get data, devise plans, move ahead: Use QuestionPro Workforce to deploy employee surveys and gather data. Use the data to launch new initiatives, gauge what can be done better, etc. Do not reduce the employee to numbers though, go beyond that. Engage with them, understand their concerns, ideas, etc. This will be key in ensuring your employees are engaged. It is fairly common to have low engagement rates or cultural issues in organizations. Workplace culture aids in identifying what’s driving an organization’s success and what’s hindering it. We recently helped a non-profit manage their culture, which improved organization success by leaps and bounds. You can read more about it in detail here: Build a positive culture by living your values. Organizations feel culture surveys will tell them if their culture is good or bad, that notion is incorrect. There is no such thing as bad or good culture; it can only tell you where you are now and what can be done to improve it or get to your desired goal.
• Build a baseline: The tool lets you create an employee roster, where you can list all your employees across various departments, locations, job titles, etc. All employee surveys done post that point is linked and helps you observe and monitor various trends, developments, etc. We help you build the baseline that is culture, upon which there are assessments and improvements.
• Set, identify, modify priorities: To ensure a good CX, continuous improvements are needed. You set priorities and goals to enrich that experience. The same analogy applies to EX too. Identify ways in which you can enrich EX. A good EX automatically translates into good CX.
• Deploy surveys: You can start by deploying surveys, get to know your employees. Gauge how well your employees know the organization, its values, how well they are aligned with organizational goals, etc. Collect the information to move on to the next phase.
• Collate data: The data that you receive from your employees will be genuine, unadulterated feedback. Make sure you have targeted all your employees across all the departments. You can segment the surveys if need be, segregating them with respect to departments, job titles, etc.
• Analyze data: Once you have that data, you can use it to look at how closely the employees are aligned with your goals. Do they need to interact with customers more? Should they be reading customer’s messages to know more about what’s happening business-wise? These answers will be answered with these surveys. You may also need to have in-person meetings to identify and bridge any gap areas.
• Implement changes: Armed with data, you can now plan and implement new processes, revamp existing ones, make some iterative, etc. You may need to run these surveys more than once to test the level of implementation and penetration in the organization. But now, you will at least have a fair idea and a particular direction to move things ahead.

Why don’t you try our tool and see for yourself how it can help you achieve your goals. The tool is simple, is free (with many replete features), and you can create an account inside of a minute. Need we say more?!